Evolution

Evolution 1.4 Preview 3 Release Notes

It is our greatest pleasure to announce the third preview release of Evolution for GNOME 2, Evolution 1.3.3.

WARNING

The betas of Evolution are UNSTABLE. This means that it will probably crash very often, and possibly eat your mail, calendar, appointments, anything. The purpose of this release is to help users to test the new code; use at your own risk, but please do report the bugs. 8^)

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In order to install this version, you have to either use Red Carpet (Ximian's package managing application) or download the RPM packages from our FTP site.

Please note that the packages are made to work with your existing GNOME 2 packages as provided by your distribution; installing this preview release will not change your existing setup nor replace any of the base packages in your distribution.

Also, the packages are made to be parallel-installable with Evolution 1.2 so you can test Evolution 1.3 but still have the stable version as a backup.

Supported Systems

Evolution 1.3.3 preview is currently available for:

Special installation instructions for Solaris 8:

  1. Install Sun GNOME 2 which can be downloaded from Sun.
  2. Visit the Ximian download page and choose Solaris from the dropdown box. Follow the instructions to download and run the go-gnome script. Once the installer is running, install Ximian Evolution 1.2. This will create an rpm database.
  3. Using an ftp client, visit ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/ximian-gnome/solaris-8-sun4 and download and install the rpm binaries, named rpm-*.sparc.rpm. You need these for Red Carpet to work.
  4. Finally, run Red Carpet to install the Evolution Beta.

Installing through Ximian Red Carpet

The binaries for Red Hat 8 can be simply installed from the "Ximian Evolution Beta" channel from Red Carpet. If you don't have Red Carpet installed, follow the directions on the Red Carpet Download page.

After installing Red Carpet, subscribe to the "Ximian Evolution Beta" channel. You can find help installing Evolution with the original Red Carpet on the Ximian Evolution Download page.

If you are running Red Hat 9, Mandrake 9.1 or SuSE 8.2, you will need to install the Red Carpet Beta for your distribution. Information on the Red Carpet Beta, including download and install instructions and a getting started guide, can be found in the Red Carpet section of the Ximian Developer website. To install this beta, you will need to subscribe to the "Ximian Evolution Beta" channel.

Installing from FTP

All the necessary RPMs can be found at the following location (the -devel packages are optional.) 

 ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/ximian-evolution-beta/

We request that you download the files using your favorite ftp application, rather than using your browser to retrieve them. Browsers do not log out of ftp connections, which are limited, leading to refused connections and server slowdown.

Once you have the files, use the su command to become root:
$ su
Password: [Enter your root password here]

Then install the files using the rpm command:
# rpm -Uvh *.rpm

You can then launch Evolution by typing "evolution-1.3" on the command-line.

Source

The corresponding source RPMs can be downloaded from our ftp site (below). Again, please use an ftp client to download these files. 

  ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/ximian-evolution-beta/source/

Upgrade Notes

Evolution 1.3 can be installed at the same time as Evolution 1.2. However, these two versions should never be run at the same time. If you want to switch from using Evolution 1.2 to using Evolution 1.3, quit Evolution 1.2, run "killev", then run "evolution-1.3". If you want to switch from using Evolution 1.3 to using Evolution 1.2, quit Evolution 1.3, run "evolution-1.3 --force-shutdown", then run "evolution".

It is highly recommended that you make a backup of your 1.2 ~/evolution directory before switching to Evolution 1.3 to prevent data loss. If you are using POP mail, please consider using the "Leave messages on server" option to prevent your mail from being erased on the server after download. (The option can be changed from the "Receiving Options" tab of the account editor.)

All the data (mail, calendars, contacts) should be visible without any problems from both Evolution 1.2 and Evolution 1.3. Settings such as mail configuration will be imported from Evolution 1.2 the first time you launch Evolution 1.3.

If you experience any data interoperability problems between the two versions, please report them as bugs. On the other hand, please note that if you run Evolution 1.3, change your configuration, and then go back to Evolution 1.2, your changes to the configuration will be lost.

That being said, the backend code has changed very little in the migration from GNOME 1.4 to GNOME 2.0, so you should not be risking very much. :-)

Please note that Ximian Connector 1.2 will NOT work with Evolution 1.3, and that there are not going to be any public snapshots of Ximian Connector.

What Has Changed

The plan for Evolution 1.3 is to not add any new major features compared to Evolution 1.2. The aim of the upcoming stable release is to just provide the same functionality as Evolution 1.2, but with better integration with the GNOME 2 desktop, as well as to take advantage of the features of the new platform, such as better font support. Of course, a bunch of 1.2 bugs have also been fixed during the process of porting Evolution to GNOME 2.

A major change since version 1.2 is that Evolution 1.3 consists of only two processes: the front-end ("evolution-1.3") and the calendar/addressbook data backend ("evolution-wombat"). For this reason, the old "killev" script is no longer necessary for debugging purposes. If things get stuck, just run "evolution-1.3 --force-shutdown".

Known Issues

Reporting Bugs

The main purpose of this release is, of course, to gather as much testing as possible from users. Your help in testing and submitting bugs as you find them is highly appreciated.

If Evolution 1.3 crashes, please take the time to submit the bug using Bug Buddy, trying to fill in as much detail as you can regarding the circumstances that lead to the crash.

If, on the other hand, you find a problem in the behavior or the appearance of the application, please go to http://bugzilla.ximian.com/ to use our Bugzilla interface to report the bug.

You can also check if your bug has been reported before by using the search functionality of Bugzilla.

Bugs fixed

Addressbook
Calendar
Mail
Shell
Summary
gal

Other bugs

Addressbook
gal
gtkhtml
Misc
Updated translations

Copyright © 2003 GNOME Foundation